Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to spatial feature analysis for imaging and, more particularly, to the processing and storage of spatial feature descriptors.
Description of the Related Art
Many computer vision applications process imagery to identify a relatively sparse number of keypoints, which represent spatial features of interest in the corresponding imagery. These keypoints are represented using data structures referred to as spatial feature descriptors. One class of spatial feature descriptors utilizes binary, or relative comparisons, of the intensities of different regions, or “patches,” of an area of an image region, with the results of the comparisons coded as a binary string that serves as a spatial feature descriptor for the image region. For example, application of the Fast Retina Keypoint (FREAK) algorithm typically results in a 512 bit binary string descriptor for each keypoint in an image. However, with potentially thousands of keypoints in each image, and with video having tens or even hundreds of such images for every second of playback, the transmission and storage requirements for the spatial features extracted from a video segment of even a modest duration can become daunting. The difficulties in transmitting and storing spatial feature descriptors becomes even more severe for the implementation of keypoint-extraction processes in a larger-scale system, such as a server-based system or distributed system, with numerous users sending, receiving, and storing such spatial feature descriptors,